I organised a hackathon (i.e. a coding workshop) called ‘Hackout 3’, which was funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU). The event brought together epidemiologists, stakeholders from public health institutions, and members of the public (professional computer programmers) to develop new statistical tools for disease outbreak analysis and response.

In this guest blog, Imperial‘s Cathy Thomas offers advice on how to use social media to engage (and involve!) the public in your research. What have your experiences with using social media for engagement been? Share your experiences in the comments.

Why bother with social media?

There are over one billion active users on Facebook and over 100 million monthly Instagram users – which means that if you’re looking to connect with members of the public, it’s worth considering how social media and other digital tools could support or enhance your engagement activity.

The useful thing about social media is that it’s a discursive medium that encourages sharing and participation, so rather than simply using it as a tool to promote what you’re doing, there will be ways in which it can support two-way engagement.

Public involvement in health and biomedical research is increasingly seen as both desirable and necessary. Desirable because the public’s vast and varied experience can bring important perspectives to research. Necessary because many funders now require it.

What did you do?

With the help of the NIHR Imperial BRC PPI award, we were able to set up a Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) group to help shape our preterm birth research at Imperial. The funding enabled us to invite 10–15 participants to three PPI meetings over a course of 12 months. We now have an established group with around seven core members and one nominated representative. The meetings have been a great way to present, and get feedback, on our current and future research plans.

Readers of this blog will be familiar with Patient and Public Involvement in a research setting. But what does PPI look like within health care services? Here Imperial NHS Trust Lay Partners Mariam Mohammed and John Norton share their perspectives.

The hardest thing about submitting a grant application is often not knowing what the judges are looking for. So, with the call now open for this year’s NIHR Imperial BRC Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) grant scheme funding, but the deadline fast approaching, we thought we’d ask both past winners and members of the judging panel to share their thoughts and insights on what makes a winning patient and public involvement proposal…

It was a primary aim of our NIHR Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU) in Respiratory Infections to seek meaningful patient and public input in our three research areas: Influenza, Tuberculosis and Other Acute Respiratory Infections. Therefore, we appointed two patient representatives (for Flu and Tuberculosis) who were invited to our key strategic and public meetings.

Additional to that, in January 2017, we set up a panel of patients and members of the public who either had experience of respiratory conditions or were interested in our three research areas.

What did you do?

Our team (Raheelah Ahmad, Tim Rawson, Enrique Castro-Sánchez, Esmita Charani, Luke Moore and Alison Holmes) set out to explore if and how citizens would be willing to take part in setting priorities for research funding.